Alpinisms

Ghostly; 2008

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The debut LP from School of Seven Bells sounds like the result of meticulous labor, and by all accounts it is. Secret Machines' Benjamin Curtis met On!Air!Library!'s Alejandra and Claudia Deheza in late 2004 when their groups were opening for Interpol, and they embarked on an on-and-off collaboration over the next four years. EPs came out on Sonic Cathedral and Table of the Elements last year, and a remix of "Iamundernodisguise" was featured on Prefuse 73's Preparations. As for the full-length, Curtis told Pitchfork's Matthew Solarski that same year that it was in the middle of a lengthy production and revision process.

The extra time was worth it. Alpinisms retains distant echoes of the EPs, and vocal similarities to O!A!L! are inevitable, but in SVIIB’s freshest and best-yet iteration, Curtis has moved the band from downtown-arty to diaphonous, nestling the Dehezas' voices in a thick, glimmering haze. The two released versions of "Face to Face on High Places" are the clearest chart for the band's evolution: The EP version, with the same melodic hook as its later incarnation, and some frenzied drumming by Rhys Chatham associate Joe Stickney, is certainly appealing in its own right. It’s also nearly nine minutes long, vamping on its abrasive fire-dance rhythm for the last four. On Alpinisms, “Face” is focused and gleaming, the drums cycling like faraway pistons and the gossamer verse melody recalling My Bloody Valentine's "Blown a Wish".

Like the rest of the album, "Face" revels in its artificiality, but in an uncanny way that works to heighten its foregrounded aura of mystery and mysticism. The other synthetic pleasure at work on Alpinisms is the way it hails and integrates its influences: Listen to the gothic shimmer of "Connjur" and "My Cabal", and try to avoid thinking of the icy soundscapes of Cocteau Twins' Heaven or Las Vegas (indeed, Robin Guthrie remixed "My Cabal" for the Sonic Cathedral 7") and Flood's cavernous production on Depeche Mode's Violator. The record might be named for the most frigid of outdoor activities, but, like its most recognizable predecessors, Alpinisms thoroughly blurs the distinction between chilly and warm.

Yet despite the band's modernist approach to emotions and sensations, their abstruse lyrics and spiritual overtones most directly recall John Lennon's late-1960s, post-India assimilation of the mundane with the mystical. On songs like "I'm Only Sleeping", "Tomorrow Never Knows", and "I'm So Tired", he used the liminal state between deep sleep and an Eastern-tinged state of full consciousness as a metaphor for wandering through life in a trance. The woozy chorus of SVIIB's single "Half Asleep" takes the same approach, making dream pop in the strictest sense: "What begins as an unguarded train of thought slowly can become an addiction to the slumber of disconnection". It looks wordy in print, but sounds effortless on record, the Dehezas' pristine voices elegantly negotiating a rising and falling cadence. On the album's longest and most "Eastern" song "Sempiternal/Amaranth", they get to the point more directly-- "We walk around half-there all the time"-- before vamping for a few minutes on the lyric "Allow yourself to be relieved", or the new "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream."

Throughout Alpinisms, the group finds a perfect middle ground between the indie realms of tribal and choral, layering electronic flourishes without letting them overwhelm the arrangements. Opening track "Iamundernodisguise" accomplishes this most effectively, with the Dehezas' mantra-like vocals riding the thrumming groove of the verse, until the lyric "my heart a drum of water" propels the song into a wordless chorus.

Alpinisms has its pitfalls: "For Kalaja Mari" and "White Elephant Coat", though not failures, combine mid-record to edge the record too closely to the New Age valley it so effectively skirts elsewhere. But at their best, School of Seven Bells know what they want to achieve, and do it gracefully and with style to spare. They supposedly took their name from a mysterious South American pickpocketing school, which trained its students by having them practice on mannequins equipped with bells-- one of them rings: the student fails. It's an effective metaphor for how SVIIB synthesizes its music: Carefully pulling from a myriad of sources (inspirational and instrumental), but doing so with cleverness that only comes from discipline and patience.